Posts by Mary Yugo

Basically when it is boiling at 1 atm, it saturates the bottom sensor, then the middle, leaving only the top one to show differences in power. Not that complicated. Other people made similar calorimeters and confirmed they work as described.

Sorry but that means nothing to me. I've been around the block a few times with several types of calorimeters and never saw that. What does "saturate" mean in this context? What do you mean by "top sensor"? The diagram shows two thermistors embedded in the wall, towards the top of the device, one offset a few cm radially from the first. What does that arrangement measure and why?

I guess nobody cares about discussing the details of the so-called 100W experiment. That's what usually happens with LENR reports. Lots of claims and claimed results and no follow up or proper exact replication by others. That's one of the main reasons main line science pays no attention. The poor quality of the papers (lousy figures, unclear materials and methods, weird choices of units for axes of graphs, blurry presentation on the page and questionable calibrations) are other reasons.

So can anyone explain precisely how the calorimeter used in that experiment measures heat flow and heat production ? "First principles" please, not mumbo jumbo.

Of course, I learned all that by not reading them (or, anyway, *trying* to read them)... right Jed?

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In any case, there are many examples of high powered cold fusion with no input power at all...

For appreciably long periods? Link or cite please. Or it's just hot air.

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That depends on the nature of the input power. If it is direct current electricity it is easy to measure with extreme precision, so it can be subtracted with confidence.

I am not concerned about the input power measurement. Anyone can do that accurately, assuming it's DC and not spikes or odd waveforms. It's the calorimetry that is, as always, in question, in Celani style experiments. The OUTPUT power is the problem, not the input.

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That is to say, you could see the cells were boiling. After a while there was no more liquid between the anode and cathode, so there was no electrical current. Blank cells driven to high power immediately stop boiling when this happens, yet these cells not only continued to boil, they remained hot to the touch for hours.

Woo Whoo! That ranks right up there on the woowoo scale with Rossi's stethoscopy and Steorn's oscilloscopy. You expect respect for LENR from that sort of statement? No wonder you got hornswoggled by Rossi.

Lewan got roundly and thoroughly bamboozled by Rossi when he could have easily stopped it by simply asking for ONE proper calibration of the original ecat experiments he was observing and reporting. He could have asked the same of Levi in the early fluid flow calorimeter Levi did with original ecats in early 2011 which Lewan published in NyTeknik. Instead, he continued to exhibit incompetence or negligence or both for going on four years. His career as a science and technology reporter should not just be damaged. It should be ended because he is clearly neither sufficiently critical nor clever to discriminate between obvious scam and reality. But yes, he seems like a nice family type of guy. A very gullible one.

Mary, that's quite enough from you on this particular topic. Your opinion of anybody who ever gave a taxi-cab ride to a cold-fusion associate are well known. Alan.

... if you want to do so, please continue to mock me. Criticize me until no one even reads a single post I make. Because all it can do is benefit me by enticing me to spend more of my time in the real world rather than staying up all hours in the night chasing dreams that may never become tangible.

@MrSelfSustainIf you spend a lot of time reading about Rossi and the pure crappolla Rossi writes, you are indeed wasting your time. Remember, Rossi is a convicted felon. Rossi has done nothing but fool people, create costly frauds, and make truly huge and costly environmental disasters. Your problem is that you believe Rossi because what he offers is so enticing. Hey, what Bernie Madoff offered was even more enticing and made of much of the same stuff-- vapor. THINK! Rossi has made huge claims now going on seven years. Robotic factories, cheap isotopes, a substantial number of satisfied customers, certificators working away to make the ecats an everyday gadget offered in stores, and much more. And guess what? NOT ONE WORD OF IT, NOT ONE, HAS EVER BEEN INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED. Nothing Rossi ever says can be checked. You do not have to be well versed in science and technology to understand that-- just use a little common sense! If Rossi were telling the truth, the evolution of the device would not proceed (or more accurately, fail to proceed) as it has.

There was never any need at all to design a hot cat before the original ecat was placed on the market. The original ecat supposedly made low pressure steam at very low cost and without carbon emissions. That would be enough to heat countless (billions) of residences world wide and to make Rossi billions of dollars. Instead, Rossi promoted obvious mismeasurement of hot cats using incorrect and insufficient instruments and methods. Now, he's claiming the incredibly unlikely "QuarkX". Interestingly, Quark was the name of a Star Trek character who was a merchant from a civilization without conscience for whom any deal they could foist on others was a good deal.

Want to spend time to consider workable non polluting power sources that don't increase global warming, think about the new generation of fission reactors such as were recently featured on PBS/NOVA: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb…n-innovate-nuclear-power/ THIS, and not Rossi, Defkalion and Brillouin and BLP, is real science and encouraging technology for the coming decade.

Amazing irony. Lewan is the guy whose total lack of suspicion and skeptical ability promoted and assisted Rossi's costly and fraudulent activities. I am surprised he is not also sued by IH for his gross negligence and incompetence in testing Rossi for years without insisting a single, NOT ONE, calibration during that whole time. Instead, Lewan swallowed Rossi's lies hook line and sinker and used his status as a journalist to promote them. He should talk about the need to be critical about novel inventions! Maybe he should focus on his many years of spectacular screwups with Rossi *and* Defkalion who also bamboozled him.

I'd be happy to get into a detailed discussion of the 100W paper. Maybe someone can start a new string about it so we don't bore those who don't care about that claim. I suggest starting with Jed explaining exactly how the calorimeter used in that study works. All I see in the paper is a block of some sort with the cell inside and three thermistor pairs embedded in the plastic (?) wall. One member of each pair is close to the center of the cavity of the calorimeter and the other is just a short distance towards the outside from it. Are these supposed to be a crude measure of heat flux using the material of the calorimeter wall as a "gradient layer" or what? That's the first place I stalled in reading the paper. How the heck does the calorimeter measure the heat flux from the reaction?

yeah, I know, I am ignorant and never read anything or I'd know... now let's leave that aside and explain how the thing is supposed to measure heat excess.

Nothing seems dumber to me than Rossi's claim to having manufactured his smallest and most radical device yet. Suppose he could make a Quark and he showed to someone like Elon Musk or Bill Gates. He'd be an instant billionaire. Rather, the quark "works" for Rossi like all the other Rossi claims, for example, the robotic factories, the cheaply made isotopes of nickel, the NATO colonel, the ever elusive customer and customers, etc. etc. etc. But the quark is dumber than everything before it. Why? Because Rossi is trying to extrapolate to absurdity the method used by Nigerian scammers to choose marks (victims) for their scams. This is all explained in this article: http://freethoughtblogs.com/si…id-and-yet-so-successful/

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It turns out that a computer scientist at Microsoft named Cormac Herley, who works on combating computer hacking, tried to think like a scammer, did a cost-benefit analysis and realized that this crudeness is a feature, not a bug. In his paper titled Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?, he posed the question:

Why so little imagination? Why don’t Nigerian scammers claim to be from Turkey, or Portugal or Switzer- land or New Jersey? Stupidity is an unsatisfactory answer: the scam requires skill in manipulation, considerable inventiveness and mastery of a language that is non-native for a majority of Nigerians. It would seem odd that after lying about his gender, stolen millions, corrupt officials, wicked in-laws, near-death escapes and secret safety deposit boxes that it would fail to occur to the scammer to lie also about his location.

The answer is that the obviousness of the scam is a way of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of the responses. It is similar to the strategy that computer hackers use.

Here’s the explanation in a nutshell. It does not cost the scammers much to send out mass emails. What is costly is the time and effort to reel in a sucker once they have initially responded to the bait. That can be a time-consuming process, involving as it does customized interactions over an extended period of time. As Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel Simons write in The Wall Street Journal, it took scammers about six months to extract $80,000 from a middle-aged New England psychotherapist.

So what the scammers want to do is weed out right from the start those people who initially respond but are unlikely to send them money. In other words, they need to reduce the number of false positive signals and one way to do that is with a fairly obvious message.

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I have no idea if this is a conscious effort on the part of Rossi or if it involves lunacy. But clearly, Rossi always chooses his marks with care, for example poor hapless Lewan and probably also Levi. So it makes sense he pitches only to people who are so inept at critical thinking and scientific evaluation that they will believe him. In my opinion, the Quark idea is too extreme to work on ANY investor, especially in light of Rossi's past and recent history, but then who would have thought he'd get away with all the other obviously idiotic claims he made and lies he told and still snare an organization like IH or Woodford? Or that Steorn's silly Orbo and constant beer parties and high salaries would have been financed by a group of very wealthy Irish farmers.

That is dead obvious. You need to find errors in the instruments or methods in every experiment that has produced significant excess heat. You have to show that thousands of experimental runs in 200 laboratories were all wrong, for one reason or another. If even one is correct, then cold fusion is real, and it makes no difference if the others are all wrong.

No. You are relying on the possibility that even one is correct but in fact, most of the experiments use similar methods. For example, most experiments employ isoperibolic calorimetry and most involve low absolute energy levels and/or low COP's (power out/power in) therefore they are susceptible to noise. If these methods are wrong or the experimenters are sloppy, the results are meaningless. All could well turn out to me mismeasurements. Like Rossi's and Defkalions though not necessarily (not probably) fraudulent, just wrong and overly optimistic.

That's why I like large results, both absolute power *and* energy *and* high COP. And of course, a very robust calorimetric method. I am pretty convinced I have not seen such a thing. Jed will say I don't look enough but in actuality I do. Reading many of the papers, I get bogged down in what amounts to a lack of clarity about what was done and how. A lot of the graphs are hard to understand, using, as they do, highly derived or normalized units on at least one axis. Sorry but it's too much trouble to decipher all that and it takes too much time. Most of the experiments I have seen, I could not replicate without having a long talk with the experimenter. So I am still very skepticular.

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There is not the slightest chance you will find mistakes in all positive experiments.

Of, sure there is. Well, to be picky, I may not, as you suggest, *personally* be able to find the mistakes but they may still be there. If everyone makes the same error or similar errors, all will be wrong. Science is not a popularity contest or a democratic election. Having a lot of claims to a positive result does not, of itself, insure a valid result. I find it amazing that LENR supposedly solves the world's energy problems and after all the time since 1989, nobody has made a practical, self sustaining and clear cut high energy source from it. All those people Jed cites not trying hard enough? All the wicked power companies and oil and nuclear giants suppressing it? Yah shoore.

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Joshua Cude always discredited McKubre by claiming he was not really with SRI either, as he was not listed on their roster, but he was an employee who just retired. Tanzella has been there many years, and I have no doubt he is employed, and probably the leader of the LENR team there. Maybe it is SRIs personal disclosure policy or something.

I don't know about that but McKubre is not credible because he is not discriminating or appropriately critical. He attends to total and obvious garbage like the Papp idea that energy can be extracted from noble gases without energy input.

@MSS: that assumes Rossi is sane, which, at this point, is questionable. As for dragging things out, I don't think IH would have played along much longer. I bet they were at the end of their rope with Rossi never delivering anything workable. I bet they were about to sue him if he had not sued them.

My thinking about multiple wires is that these wires are low mass. Therefore, many of them can be heated by the same (or almost the same) heating power required for one wire. Yes, the heater would thus be more efficient and the signal to noise ratio (COP) would be much higher because the same amount (or almost the same amount) of heater power in would yield many more times the heat out. That would make accurate measurement much higher. How hard can it be? In more than 3 years of screwing around with these wires, they never tried it. Note that National Instruments gave up on them.

Sorry I misspelled your name. I think we got off on the wrong track here. It's nothing personal. Making obvious errors with simple units is usually a "tell" of people who think they know what they are talking about with respect to a scientific subject but actually have no clue. I only recall calling attention to it, not insulting you personally. If I did that, I apologize and I assure you it was not intended. You are, of course, welcome to your opinion.

I am often struck by the fact that obviously intelligent people like Shane and like yourself (you have to be smart to be an airline pilot and to have your career) still believe in total garbage like Steorn, Defkalion and Rossi and look without skepticism at bizarre claims like Brillouin's and Nanospire's. Think, man! If Rossi really had a cold fusion device that makes megawatts, do you think IH would not pay them? What sense does that make?

@Wyttenbach If anyone dislikes Mills, perhaps it's because he sucks millions in research dollars over decades and produces nothing but razzle dazzle flashes (and more unlikely claims) for all that work and those resources, which could be better used.

I've always been willing to bet large amounts of money that Rossi will never prove his product really works, for example, by selling it at Home Depot or having it properly tested by say, Consumer's Union. But nobody ever takes me up on it. IH made one very large bet on Rossi and look where they are with it, something like three years later.

PRWeb is a garbage product which publishes any whackjob story you pay them too. At one time, they were ecstatic about Steorn. Not sure what to make of the SRI Twitter post. It's hardly a scientific paper. Who even knows who wrote it and why?

Jed, do you want to discuss the claimed 100W paper in detail, starting with the basic construction and calibration of the so-called calorimeter? Maybe starting another thread would be best? I don't believe that the methodology of heat measurement is sound. I also wonder why nobody bothered to repeat the construction and testing of a small device which seemingly makes 100W excess power essentially indefinitely. The original work is dated 1996! Where are the replications? Where are the improvements? Why are not universities everywhere studying this? But do you want to discuss this with me and others in a separate string?

My theory about work with isoperibolic so-called calorimeters is that they are so sloppy and vague in design that calibration and other errors can hide in them and the excess heat results could be errors or noise. I never understood why, knowing about better calorimeters such as the gradient layer or Seebeck effect calorimeters Storms worked with, they don't use these or at least substitute heat flux transducers (many of them) for simple spot temperature measurements. Unless I misunderstood something, all these guys use to measure heat flow is three thermistor pairs where the members of the pair are embedded in some sort of plastic and are a few mm. apart. Is that wrong? Is that not what an "isoperibolic calorimeter" is? Where did that strange name come from anyway? Can anyone defend such crude technology?

Oh yeah, I forgot. I am a stupid flunkie who can't and won't read grand and illustrious LENR papers as Jed is fond of reminding me.

And about MFPM and Celani wires. Celani AND MFPM resist consistently the most OBVIOUS improvement suggested by me and others in their experiments-- namely, the addition of many more wires heated by the same heat source. This could increase the signal to noise, or so-called COP factor, by a factor of 10X or more and has been asked for since the Celani wires came to light, maybe what now...? Four years ago? WHY DON'T THEY DO THIS VERY OBVIOUS THING if the wires work at all? It isn't rocket science!

You got a lot of nerve [removed] criticizing me because you disagree where I put a forward slash...

Sadly, you don't even seem to understand the critique. It's not about where you put a forward slash but about the fact that you don't seem to understand basic dimensional analysis and the use of units.

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... when you use a fake name to post in forums. Unlike you I do not disguise who I am.

Bully for you-eee. Until I demand that you believe me based on my name rather than on what I write, that's also nonsense.

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No Im not a scientist or physicist, but I have worked on energy projects specifically wind farm developments. I work for engineering firms overseeing construction of enormous water and wastewater systems of amazing complexity. I have 30 years experience building systems and have a strong understanding of all system components and how they integrate. I really don't care about the physics of Mills et al Rossi's cold fusion systems. I care about how they will operate and how they may integrate into my industry. I'm not here to criticize when someone makes a spelling error unlike you who finds great pleasure in belittling anyone with whom you may disagree. In other words offer helpful criticism or just sit in your cubicle and STFU.

The problem you are missing with your lack of proper background in science and engineering is that Mills' and Rossi's "systems" almost certainly don't work and have no place in any industry. So, you disagree? What industry is Mills' device used in after more than 25 years of specious claims and expensive development? How about Rossi's stuff? Who uses it and where after claims of "customer" installations since at least 2011? Who are all the mysterious customers? Where are they and how do they maintain such complete and absolute secrecy? (clue: they do it by not existing!)

Come on, John. Use your head. I know you badly wish these things were real but look at the evidence instead of the claims, for once!